We are witnessing the decline and fall of the social order which began with the industrial revolution 160 years ago.  The cancer of industrialism has begun to mortify, and the end is in sight.  Within 200 years, it may be—­for we must allow for backwashes and cross-currents which will retard the flow of the stream—­the hideous new towns which disfigure our landscape may have disappeared, and their sites may have been reclaimed for the plough.  Humanitarian legislation, so far from arresting this movement, is more likely to accelerate it, and the same may be said of the insatiate greed of our new masters.  It is indeed instructive to observe how cupidity and sentiment, which (with pugnacity) are the only passions which the practical politician needs to consider, usually defeat their own ends.  The working man is sawing at the branch on which he is seated.  He may benefit for a time a minority of his own class, but only by sealing the doom of the rest.  A densely populated country, which is unable to feed itself, can never be a working-man’s paradise, a land of short hours and high wages.  And the sentimentalist, kind only to be cruel, unwittingly promotes precisely the results which he most deprecates, though they are often much more beneficial than his own aims.  The evil that he would he does not; and the good that he would not, that he sometimes does.

For, much as we must regret the apparently inevitable ruin of the upper and upper middle classes, to which England in the past has owed the major part of her greatness, we cannot regard the trend of events as an unmixed misfortune.  The industrial revolution has no doubt had some beneficial results.  It has founded the British Empire, the most interesting and perhaps the most successful experiment in government on a large scale that the world has yet seen.  It has foiled two formidable attempts to place Europe under the heel of military monarchies.  It has brought order and material civilisation to many parts of the world which before were barbarous.  But these achievements have been counterbalanced by many evils, and in any case they have done their work.  The aggregation of mankind in large towns is itself a misfortune; the life of great cities is wholesome neither for body nor for mind.  The separation of classes has become more complete; the country may even be divided into the picturesque counties where money is spent, and the ugly counties where it is made.  Except London and the sea-ports, the whole of the South of England is more or less parasitic.  We must add that in the early days of the movement the workman and his children were exploited ruthlessly.  It is true that if they had not been exploited they would not have existed; but a root of bitterness was planted which, according to what seems to be the law in such cases, sprang up and bore its poisonous fruit about two generations later.  It is a sinister fact that the worst trouble is now made by the youngest men.  The large fortunes which were made by the